Prentice's blog

Posture, For One and All!

Prentice — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 15:19:25 +0000

Author:

Chris Ortiz y Prentice

Image Credit:

John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (1934)

You don’t have to be a dyed-in-the-wool empirist to believe that we must learn how to move and hold our bodies. Yet who among us learned anything about posture at school?

Not I, at any rate, although maybe that’s because I went to public school in the United States. We had P.E. (Physical Education), presumably under the theory that students are better able to concentrate in class if they run around a bit from time to time. Yes, like a great many, I was forced from Middle School through High School to go through the usual routine of locker room, stretching, running, and back to locker room, a ritual that amounted to little more than a daily opportunity for social-jockeying and hazing. That is to be expected, of course, and can be chalked up to “social skills,” but we weren’t learning the first thing about, for instance, strength, flexibility, speed, agility, nutrition, breathing, relaxation, musculature, injuries: in short, any of the well developed canon of learning which pertains to the body and its betterment. (Perhaps the P.E. teachers thought we were learning about all that in “Health” class; but where I went to school they might as well have called it “Pictures of STDs” class.)

One of the innumerable things I didn’t think a whit about until I got into my twenties, then, was posture. By the time I became aware of mine, it was atrocious.

How did it get so bad?

As a book-inclined and myopic child of middle class parents, I spent a lot of time inside, pouring over a desk, and then later, leaning in towards a computer. In High School, I did endless math exercises sitting on the couch with the book on my lap. Looking out over the classroom, my instructors must have seen row after row of slumped-shoulders, pooched out tummies, and c-shaped backs, all like mine. I wonder if they gave it a second thought.

No doubt the government hesitates to weigh in on such personal and therefore political issues as proper posture, but I see no reason why professional educators should not take on teaching students about fitness. It’s a specialized subject, experience doesn’t necessarily impart it to you, and neither do your parents.

Now, what accounts for this oversight, not to say repression, of students’ bodies in U.S. institutions of public education? Our dirty minds, no doubt, and a dread of any accusation of improper physical contact between adults and youths. Probably you could describe the entire social apparatus of modern-day public schools -- rules, organizational hierarchies, classroom practices, et al. -- as the protection of the adults from the students' sexualities, and vice versa.

That’s a big reason, and it explains some of the assumptions that undergird postwar social institutions, theories, and technologies.

The personal computer is a prime example.

Computers were developed according to a Cartesian dualism in which the cognitive brain is entirely disassociated from the fleshy body. This dualism complements nicely the mortification of the body central to influential Judeo-Christian traditions. Pair Cartesian dualism with Christian mortification and you have the unconscious mindset, I would wager, of the mostly engineers who sat around in air-conditioned rooms in the fifties, sixties, and seventies, inventing computers. (The Silicon Valley crowd has a cool image, nowadays, but I ask you: is the iPad embodied computing? Or is it just a touch-screen?)

In a word, computers, like the (U.S.) public schools, are made for myopic, seated, hunch-shouldered, data-fetishists. No chance for improper contact between brains in jars, is there?

Once upon a time, though, posture was taught. “Your carriage, Madam!” -- a title only history could provide -- is an illustrated handbook published in the 1930s. It smacks of blue blood and patriarchy, of course, but flipping through its pages, I’m struck with the good sense of several of its illustrations and even some of its advice.

You had to be one of the “ornamental sex,” it would appear, to be taught “carriage” in the 1930s. And no doubt, you were learning carriage when you could have been learning mathematics, a boy’s subject. But when the middle-class threw out the bath water, is it possible they paid too little heed to the baby? If so, it’s too bad because holding oneself in a position of balance and strength (or as the 1930s could put it, “grace” and “action”) should not be the exclusive province of a by-gone elite.

And in fact, middle class people are starting to recognize the deleterious effects of their bad posture. The standing desk strikes me as a healthier and more embodied practice of working inside.

We need to teach posture to children in the public schools. Now, I know that means overcoming quite a lot. If you’ve read this far, I can imagine the doubts quickly populating your mind. You’re thinking I’m naïve. Middle School and High School is a jungle: drugs, guns, and teen pregnancy are today’s concerns. Posture, for better or worse, is a word for yester-year.

Would I have learned posture even if my high school phys-ed instructors had taught me how to stretch -- and I mean really taught it, as a good practical yoga teacher does, with words and demonstration, and without needing to touch you? Certainly I would not have done anything to open myself to the shame tactics of the other boys. My teachers reckoned on this and had thoroughly reconciled themselves to the fact that we had dirty minds and were little hellions. And they were right. We would have jeered and giggled. We were too cool for school.

But, you know, maybe later that night, in the privacy of my own room, I might have tried out a downward dog. Teaching, day in day out, has got to be one of the hardest professions because it requires unflagging idealism. If one student is listening, then it’s worth teaching, isn’t it?

Rhetorical Video Games

Prentice — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 16:06:57 +0000

Author:

Chris Ortiz y Prentice

Image Credit:

via James Vaughan

I ran my Mass Effect 1 lesson plan today, and I must say that I’m all fired up about it. Why? Because it worked. Turns out, you can use a video game to teach a rhetorical concept, and not just as a medium that can be rhetorically analyzed, but as a modeling technology that enables (indeed requires) the cognitive work rhetorical concepts entail. (See, e.g., John Albierti’s recent article in Computers and Composition).

Don’t get me wrong. I ran the plan because I thought it might work, but there was a part of me that was anxious about bringing a video game into the classroom; anxious that I might alienate some of my students; that the students wouldn’t take the lesson seriously; that the game wouldn’t demonstrate what I thought it would; that the students wouldn’t get it; wouldn’t care to get it.

I’ll just say that my students allayed my anxieties. Sounds like I’m patting myself on the back here, but truth is, it wasn’t a perfect lesson plan, nor was it perfectly executed, nor was every single student totally into it. But I was surprised by my students today. Their responses to the game showed me possibilities for using Mass Effect in the classroom that I hadn’t recognized before.

One thing I learned is just how incredibly rhetorically-minded BioWare’s Mass Effect series is. Mass Effect is the cutting-edge in the quest-driven, single-player Role Playing Game genre (so: save the universe from the bad guys by developing your avatar’s skills and equipment). What distinguishes Mass Effect from its predecessors is BioWare’s innovative “dialogue wheel” system, which gives Shepard the last call on how to articulate the gamer’s rhetorical decisions. Instead of mimicking the phrasing of the rhetorical option presented on the screen, that is, Shepard utters something which accomplishes that rhetorical task but not always in the way you expected. The player must therefore take into account the entire critical situation—who is the audience, how might the audience react to certain decisions judging from what has happened in the game so far, how might Shepard translate the prompt into actual language, and how might that language exceed the original rhetorical intention—before providing an additional rhetorical stimulus.

In the scene I had the students play, the character/avatar Shepard has just taken over command of the starship Normandy and s/he’s giving a speech to rile up her crew and to shore up their confidence about the mission they’re about to undertake. I had five different students play through the same scene while we considered how Shepard’s speech develops along different paths depending on the rhetorical prompts chosen. (It was fun.) As the speech goes on, the camera cuts to Shepard’s audience throughout the ship. The shots shown are also governed by the rhetorical decisions the gamer makes.

For instance, when one of my students selected “Humanity is in this alone” as a rhetorical prompt, Shepard says that “None of the other species has got the guts, grit, or balls to get this mission done.” The camera then cuts to the engine room, where two humans are standing with an alien species. The alien turns slightly away from the humans and crosses his arms. On a second run-through, a student chose a different tactic. She selected “Humanity must do its part,” which makes Shepard talk about how humans and aliens will have to work together to defeat Saren (the bad guy). When the camera shot to the same engine-room, the alien opens up his folded arms and turns slightly towards the human characters. (What delights me is that I didn’t catch this difference; one of my students did!)

I led a discussion in which we talked about the concepts of invented ethos (how the decisions you make change Shepard’s character; how the crew responds differently to Shepard depending on the ethos s/he develops in the speech). We also talked about the relative advantages and disadvantages of going different ways with the speech: namely, you can alienate the alien crew members and thereby build a strong connection to the extremist pro-human humans on the ship; or you can lose those humans’ support but gain a broader inter-species base of support throughout the ship. Finally, we talked about how persuasive writing is “modular,” in that rhetorical decisions one makes have differently weighted consequences. So a decision you make at the beginning of a paper affords certain decisions you can make later on, and closes off other decisions that would have been afforded by making a different decision at the beginning.

This is a relatively complex notion, but it was not difficult to explain to my students, because they had just been playing around with how the rhetorical decisions you make for Shepard afford X decisions and deny Y decisions. By the final play-throughs, students were saying things like, “Oh, we missed our chance to say that because we chose…” and “Next time, let’s choose that option because it gives us all those prompts we haven’t tried.”

I’ll mention, finally, that there is no “correct” way to go through the scene. Different choices are “scored” with either paragon or renegade points. Why certain ways of making the speech warrant either paragon or renegade points was one of the topics we discussed in class.

My point in all of this is that Mass Effect is a rhetorical game: it models rhetorical situations, and then gives the gamer a chance to play around in those situations while at the same time providing a perspective “outside” the game from which the player can observe the consequences on the audience of making these rhetorical decisions as opposed to those. The camera work underscores the rhetorical quality of speech-acts by capturing the audience’s differing reactions.

I mentioned that the plan wasn’t perfectly conceived of or perfectly executed. There is definitely room to develop pedagogical uses for Mass Effect and other “rhetorical” games (the Fallout series comes to mind, or Heavy Rain for PS3). Next semester, I plan on bringing Mass Effect into the classroom earlier in the semester. (The scene I used today would have been particularly effective for teaching ethos in the second unit, or teaching “critical situation” right off the bat in the first unit). I might then bring the game back into the classroom for the third unit and have them play a different scene, to which I would append a writing assignment that would have students articulate on paper what the game does modularly and visually. I can imagine an assignment, for instance, where I ask students to translate their papers into the sorts of rhetorical prompts they saw in the game. Then students could mind map their papers to show how early decisions open up onto later decisions, while making certain decisions takes other options out of play. Such an assignment might help students think explicitly about why they’re organizing their persuasive essays the way they are, and how a different set of “moves” might have different effects.

You know…there’s a BioWare studio in Austin. It’d be interesting to see what some of the game’s creators think about its pedagogical uses. Just a thought.

raygregredo preview.jpg

Cofounders of BioWare Ray Muzyka (left) and Greg Zeschuk

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

Why We Just Can't Seem to Teach Logos

Prentice — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:56:01 +0000

Author:

Chris Ortiz y Prentice

Image Credit:

Amy Zhang

When it comes to argumentation, what's the hardest subject to teach: pathos, ethos, or logos? Based on my experiences teaching RHE306 and RHE309K and from asking my colleagues this question over the past two years, I believe the answer is indisputably LOGOS.

What's so hard about teaching logos? I think the big reason is that, when you're talking about persuasion and then you introduce the word “logos,” students' brains immediately recall the word “logic.” Instructors hesitate to allow this understanding. Many, including myself, dispute it outright.

When and where I went to college, logic was a vestigial subject, at least so far as the humanities were concerned. You could take “Symbolic Logic” from the Philosophy Department (cross-listed as a mathematics course), and a number of courses in logic were offered by the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

It didn't use to be this way: in the past, Aristotelian logic was viewed as an elementary education for the liberal arts. But with the ascendancy of Analytic Philosophy in the early parts of the twentieth century – largely as a result of the work of Gottlob Frege on predicate logic – logic's disciplinary ties with rhetoric were severed. In English-speaking universities today, logic is more likely taught as a highly-specific and technical field more closely aligned with mathematics than with Rhetoric or English. Search the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for “logic” to see the proof of this historical change.

If students think logic when I say “logos,” this is a big problem because, first off, I know that I don't really know anything about logic, properly speaking; and second off, what the students call logic isn’t really logic, either. In any event, I’ve never had a student with any training in logic. My sense is that students use the term to mean something like “indisputable reasoning.”

But herein lies the final confusion that, I would wager, makes teaching logos so hard for us rhetoric instructors, and not just for me. The rise of Analytic Philosophy was accompanied, in the elite philosophy departments where these sorts of things go down, by the downfall of positivism. Wittgenstein was refuting his own Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus – widely considered the state-of-the-art in predicate logic – as early as the mid-1930s. Around the same time, Alfred North Whitehead, co-author with Bertrand Russell of the Principia Mathematica (1910-13), had not only given up logic altogether but, like Wittgenstein, had undergone a conversion and would next appear on the philosophical stage as a profound anti-positivist in Process and Reality (1929).

So much for logic. It really exists. Computer programmers use it. And that’s all I can tell you. But what about logos?

While philosophers of the Anglophone academy were relegating logic to mathematics departments, Continental philosophers were spending the half-century explicitly critiquing the whole notion of reasoning. As those of us educated under the post-structuralist hegemony know so well, “logos” becomes a primary site for deconstruction. If I can’t understand “logos” as a persuasive technique it’s no doubt because the whole thrust of my education has been underwritten by its deconstruction.

At this point, the conversation veers into the philosophical quagmire of relativism. Without muddying the waters, I suggest that logos is hard to teach simply because we do not know what it is. As a term, it is hopelessly overdetermined. As a technique, it is – perhaps regrettably -- foreign to our education. And then we’re trying to teach it to nineteen-year-olds, who have all too much faith in sense-making as it is.

That's my diagnosis: as for curative measures, I'm afraid I'm at a loss. As close as I can come to this daunting subject is "affordance," for which the times and its technologies have better prepared me and my students.

Better than Rhetoric

Prentice — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:39:36 +0000

Author:

Chris Ortiz y Prentice

Image Credit:

Molleindustria

My thinking about rhetoric and realism has been greatly elucidated this year by my class, Rhetoric of Video Games.

Like most graduate student instructors, “intros,” “surveys” and “skills” courses have been my bread and butter: not a bad meal, after all, although rare has been the class that inspired my own thinking about a question. The discussions I’ve led with the students of Rhetoric of Video Games, by contrast, have very often gone beyond what many working in the field are talking about. These students are juniors and seniors, some business and economics majors, a handful of fine arts and communications people, a few computer science students, mostly boys, but a select group of conquer-the-world-with-pizzazz-type young women. What brings us all together is a love of videogames. One thing I haven’t done this semester is talk about illustrating your argument with example or supporting your claim with evidence; never had to. These students talk about videogames like Bob Costas talks about the Olympics. It is their delight to bring a game up in class discussion. Whenever a new game is mentioned, it receives cheers (or boos) from the entire class. I’m talking about hands-clapping, huzzahing celebration. The twenty-odd students in my class have been waiting to talk seriously about videogames for a long time now, and it has been my pleasure to give them a reason for doing so. In fact, I have already learned a great deal about videogames from these students, and I dedicate the thoughts below to them.

Pretty much everything we know about rhetoric and, in, and of videogames we take from Ian Bogost’s excellent Persuasive Games (2007). There, Bogost makes a distinction between “serious games”--which, for training purposes, put the player in the role of a functionary of some sort or another, say, a public high school teacher or a soldier--and “persuasive games.” For a game to be truly persuasive by Bogost’s criteria, it must put the user at a critical distance from the role it also asks him or her to adopt. This is a particular kind of make-believe; not immersive--as in, you are an IRS agent, and if you don’t want to lose your job, you’d better act like one--but contemplative and experimental--as in, think about the sorts of decisions the top suits at McDonalds are called on to make, the tactics they must implement, to maintain annual growth of x percent. A properly persuasive game does not train; it argues. Playing from a perspective at once “from within” and “from above” the game, Bogost suggests, is sufficient to realize an argument: “The McDonald’s Videogame [by Molleindustria] mounts a procedural rhetoric about the necessity of corruption in the global fast food business, and the overwhelming temptation of greed, which leads to more corruption” (31). Games become critical when they eschew immersion for abstraction (45-6).

Literary Realism, I would argue, has been at this very crux for a long time now -- but with a difference. Clearly, realism in novels or cinema or drama has a moral dimension; very often, characters will mount larger arguments about the way things work, and the internal workings of realist narratives are often pinned to a kind of moral machination. But a novel, a play, a movie: these forms put the reader into a different relation with the "players" than does a persuasive game. A good realist story gives each character as much due as possible--it develops "where they're coming from" to the utmost degree. The user in realism, furthermore, does not have access to the "game state" of the plot; as in life, there is no access in realism to the rules of the game--either for reader or for author. The result of realism's particular expressive technology is that the reader is not asked to experiment with the configuration of the roles but rather to come to understand why people are acting a particular way. Does this empathy lead to universal approval? Not at all: many times, a closer understanding begets a more intense contempt. But there is a fatality in realism; as an author, one must have the characters act on expectations that they are playing this game and not another. As a reader, it is futile to regret the decisions of a fictional character.

This is to say that realism does not mount arguments. Let’s take a couple of high-realist test cases. There are no better candidates to ascertain whether realim makes an argument than two among the most argumentative instances of high realism: Jude the Obscure (1895) and Mrs. Warren's Profession (1893). So what could be the argument of Jude? Society is very bad because it doesn't let people get along? That's not an argument at all. An argument requires an exhortation, and, as the critics have long noted, Hardy relentlessly shuts down aveues for change in Jude. Structurally, the novel is an anti-Bildungsroman in the method of tragicomedy; thematically, Jude adopts Sue’s opposing worldview precisely when--and for the same reason--Sue adopts Jude's, leaving each as they were before: hopelessly unable to see eye-to-eye. Mrs. Warren's Profession is no different; in the end, Vivie admits to understanding the "Crofts philosophy of life" but chooses to go another way, not out of a sentiment of good and bad but out of an unremitting self-honesty. What could then be the argument of Mrs. Warren's Profession? Be like Vivie, not like Crofts or Mrs. Warren; but Vivie herself would denounce that as the very sort of infantile moral and “sentiment”--what her mother calls “pretence”-- she wishes to be done with, once for all. Anyone familiar with these works will immediately see how pointless it is to try and reduce them into argumentative proposition.

What we've learned is that realism deals in argument without itself being an argument. Indeed, the great problem of nineteenth century realist aesthetics--and the generative problematic which initiates every new realist project, up to the present day--is how to go beyond argument.

One more stopping point before we arrive at the moral of this, my teacher's tale.

If realism isn’t argument, then (going back to the Bogost) surely it’s because it takes an immersive rather than abstracting approach to representation. I thought this too for a while, but let’s go back to the McDonald's game now that we have an understanding of realism under our belts. Suppose that the argument one gets from playing the game is that McDonald's is necessarily bad for the world because its purpose is not to feed human beings but to amass surplus value. To make this argument, the McDonald's game forces your hand; you seem to be playing “from above”--above even the CEO or the shareholders--but you find yourself powerless to change the game's outcomes: bribing officials, clearing forests, dislocating poor people, pumping cows full of hormones, etc. It turns out that the McDonald’s game is every bit as tragic as realism. Given this main difference between immersion and abstraction with which we’ve been dealing, how could that be?

Recall that realism also takes a view “from above" and that the telescoping of perspectives between “from within” and “from above” allows realism to achieve tragedy. Realism is tragic, in other words, because it immerses, then abstracts, and allows us to see how inevitable all this pain is. But of course, whether one comes out with a tragic issue all depends on the videogame notion par excellence, that of “interactivity.” What can you do to change a tragic course? In the McDonald’s game, you are even more limited to a rational program in your abstracted role. Why is that? Because you are nothing other than the interest which keeps all of the players playing the same game. Not only are you powerless to change the game: you are the game.

Such a role places us at the very edge of argument. As the game, we have a tragic view "from above." What interests me, however, is videogames' technological capacity to go beyond argument. To say that this game we’re playing at the moment is necessarily bad for its players is argument, but like realism, it finds itself stuck in the tragedy that follows on the heels of critique. But whenever we ask someone to act on different expectations and then give them a reason and a way to do so; whenever we say, wouldn't we all be better off to play another game and then offer another game, we may be moving past the problematic of realism. The question is, How to play a game in such a way that it changes the game? The challenge, for the aesthetics that takes this as its problem, is how to create a place for the user neither “from above” nor “from within” but “from outside.” This semester, I’ll be asking my wonderful students to go further than the realists could in addressing that challenge; they will try to use the capacities of the videogame medium to go beyond argument into experiment. That’s the real promise of videogames, and perhaps what makes them better than rhetoric.

Communication in the Classroom

Prentice — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:31:10 +0000

Author:

Chris Ortiz y Prentice

Image Credit:

David Sky

This semester I wanted to develop the Mass Effect lesson I devised in the fall. That lesson used the video game as a rhetorical modeling technology, which (I hoped) would have student thinking about how rhetorical decisions afford and foreclose others “down the line.” In my discussions of this lesson with many of you, I was encouraged to develop a writing lesson that would give students a chance to make their own Mass Effect-style modular arguments. The lesson I’ve learned from devising this exercise is the advantage of letting students in on the lesson-making process.

I’ll admit that, when I made the copious materials my lesson required, I wasn’t too sure myself how to turn persuasive articles into the sort of rhetorical prompts given to the player of Mass Effect. The relation between these prompts and what Shepard says is by no means obvious but an interesting rhetorical question in its own right.

So I brought the lesson to class without having mastered (or even fully understood) the skills I was asking the students to practice and develop. This made me nervous. The students perceived that I could not communicate to them precisely what I was looking for them to do. I referenced what we’d learned the previous class playing the game; I told them that I wanted them to take the provided material and make “modular” arguments; I gave them a sense of my thought process, the difficulties I’d encountered, and my ambitions for the lesson. And then I stopped talking, half-expecting insubordination. “You’ve no idea what you’re talking about! How can you ask us to do this when you can’t even do it yourself? What gives you the right to grade us when you can’t model what an A would look like?”

What I got instead was collaboration. “Wouldn’t it also be possible to write the prompts like this?” “Isn’t there another decision going on behind these words?” “Couldn’t we connect these two lines, like this, since they go to the same place from here on out?”

As luck would have it, I recently came upon a young Raymond Williams arguing for the pedagogical superiority of communication over transmission. In some educational contexts, his words (at the end of Culture and Society) might strike one as hopelessly optimistic. But in the rhe306 classroom, and last week, his argument held true:

Communication is not only transmission; it is also reception and response. . . . The very failure of so many of the items of transmission which I have listed is not an accident, but the result of a failure to understand communication. The failure is due to an arrogant preoccupation with transmission, which rests on the assumption that the common answers have been found and need only to be applied. (309, 314)

This may seem like teaching 101 to all of you, but I guess I didn’t fully trust it. I was surprised when my students turned collaborators, but I don’t know why I should’ve been, since working towards an answer is a much more satisfying experience than being told one. (Bo’s April 4^thpost is worth reading for insights into how to devise lessons that purposefully make the learning process communicative and collaborative).